Completely different Lex Luthors with completely different motivations. Totally different story, too. The moll was just about the only throwback to the 1978 Luthor.
And you don’t think another story about another of Superman’s opponents would be treated similarly? This movie by this director gives me confidence that they’ll make good Superman movies.
Zod is just Lex Luthor with Superman powers or Lex Luthor with a Superman clone. There were plenty of nuggets in this film for fans of the Christopher Reaves Superman. It’s time to tell new stories about characters non-comic readers have yet to encounter.
I took the “300 years ago” crawl as metahumans became known to the world at large, rather than there were no metahumans before then. Vandal Savage has been around for over ten thousand years.
For my money, Nicholas Hoult’s Lex was fucking evil. It was nice to see a bad guy who was evil, but whose motivation makes sense. That was much more interesting than yet another insane bad guy.
You shouldn’t make a series of Superman movies with Lex Luthor as the villain in all of them. But you also shouldn’t make a series of Superman movies and never have Luthor. Luthor is well-established in the canon as Superman’s personal arch-nemesis, and so if he never shows up, people would, quite rightly, be asking why not.
Absolutely. I’d love to see a good, scary take on Brainiac.
I could picture a rogue Kyptonian AI that comes to Earth and tries to fulfill Jor-El’s mandate, in it’s own peculiar way.
I would also give the crawl some poetic license because they wanted everything to be in threes.
James Gunn has already added the 200+ year old Frankenstein metahumans to his timeline in Creature Commandos
So the blood donation location was at the historic downtown theatre – in addition to a pint of ice cream 
(and sunglasses) I got a movie pass – the theatre often shows second run or older movies, but they are also showing Superman – I may go see it.
Brian
Wow, I gotta head over to your town to bleed!
So Superman has always been my favorite superhero. I devoured comics from the DC Silver Age. My uncle had a stash of hundreds of comic books that I and my cousins read until they all but disintegrated.
The 1978 Superman movie came out when I was ten years old, and I was blown away by how awesome it all was. I even loved the reboot with Man of Steel in 2013. It had a few rough spots, but was good overall, IMHO.
So I was really, really looking forward to the 2025 reboot. I even made a point of seeing it in the theater earlier tonight to be able watch it on the big screen instead of waiting for it to reach the streaming services.
And…I thought it was just ok. And terrible in spots. And also a few good spots, like the ending when Superman gave his own heartfelt monologue in response to Lex Luthor’s.
The movie was very campy, in my opinion. Not as bad as the ‘60’s Batman TV show or the infamous Batman & Robin movie from 1997, but in the same ballpark.
I get the impulse to make DC superhero movies less dark, but this went too far in the other direction.
I also thought that the “Justice Gang” added nothing to the film and also had a really stupid name. And talk about second-rate characters! Green Lantern is ok, but Hawkgirl and Mr. Terrific?! What are they doing in a Superman movie?
Finally, the whole pocket universes and world-rending tears just made me roll my eyes. All in all, the whole movie just seemed silly. Both of the previous big-screen iterations took pains to treat the source material seriously. This one didn’t.
For me I don’t think I have seen a movie that felt more like reading a Superman comic than this one did.
What if Lex Luthor were good, instead of evil? And black, instead of white? And had a full head of hair, instead of being — wait, is he Bizarro Luthor?!?
Agreed, but for me it was like reading one of the dumber Silver Age Superman comics.
The genius of the 1978 Superman movie was that it made you feel the wonder and grandeur of the Superman mythos, starting right at the beginning with the inspired casting of Marlon Brando as Jor-El.
The 2013 Man of Steel reboot maintained this sense of seriousness and grandeur. Superman was still larger than life.
This movie, on the other hand, felt small and uninspired to me. I think it lost me when the bad guys released a Stitch monster that grew to the size of Godzilla overnight, followed by a big glowing energy being from another dimension outside his window that he just ignored while talking to Lois. It wasn’t even internally consistent. Superman is shown in the movie protecting children and squirrels, but then says his Justice Gang friends can handle the energy being. It’s either a threat or it isn’t. What if someone had gotten killed because of his inaction?
There were a few good spots, like Superman saving the little girl in slow motion, but overall it had more bad than good in my opinion.
Also I found the social media aspect hitting too close to reality. Luthor seemed like an analogue with Elon Musk, and not in a good way. The social media monkeys were a cute gag, but just seemed stupid in retrospect.
All in all, meh.
You say that like that’s a bad thing. Almost all of the things you object to are what makes the film fun, which for me is what I demand from almost any superhero story.
OG Superman was pretty goofy too. Specifically the Lex Luthor (& Co.) parts. The main antagonist. Who also felt incredibly small with his underground train station studio apartment and real estate scams.
Haven’t seen this one yet but I’m sure, subjectively, I’ll prefer the seriousness of Man of Steel. However, I don’t see anything wrong with leaning into Silver Age goofiness. As long as it’s well-written and fun and plausible within that world’s rules. In fact, hypno-glasses make a lot more sense than, ‘I slouch and part my hair different.’
I guess it was a matter of expectations.
The first two Superman movies (the 1978 and 2013 versions) each tried to answer the questions (especially in the first half of each movie): “What would it be like if Superman was real and dropped into the real world today? How would people react? How would the world react?”
The current 2025 movie addressed a different question: “What would Superman look like if the current comics were literally brought to life?” That is, bringing to life a comic book world in which superheroes and supervillains have been around forever.
I can see why they tried this approach. The first approach had already been done (at least twice on the big screen), and the second approach seemed to be working for Marvel, especially with the X-Men franchise. (In fact, this reboot seems to basically be copying the X-Men in several respects, with “metahumans” in place of mutants.)
But that “bringing-comic-books-literally-to-life” approach doesn’t do much for me personally now, which is probably why I didn’t really like it. Instead I thought it just looked silly. I might have felt differently when I was a kid.
I pretty much agree with you, except like @Elmer_J.Fudd, it’s exactly what I want from a superhero movie. It’s silly and fun with action and drama. I love that Lex Luthor is poking fun at Elon Musk and that the President of Boravia is poking fun at Donald Trump. It’s the right amount of real-world references, without burdening us with real-world downers.
It cracked me up when Superman obliterated the door to Luthor’s office and the secretary yelled, “Lex, I tried to stop him.” Overall, I really loved this movie.
Note that the pint of ice cream and sunglasses were standard Red Cross thank you items. The theatre did provide a movie pass. It is an interesting place.
Brian